Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many additional modern foreign language teachers they estimate will be needed in order to achieve the target of 90 per cent of mainstream pupils achieving the English Baccalaureate by 2020.

The proposals in the English Baccalaureate consultation launched on 3 November imply an increase in the numbers of teachers of languages needed. The EBacc-related increase is over and above the additional teachers needed to keep up with the rise in the secondary school pupil population.

We will forecast the demand for additional Modern Foreign Language teachers following the conclusion of the consultation. This will give us a better understanding of how schools plan to respond to the resulting workforce requirements from 2017/18.

The Department does this, in part, by adding policy assumptions into the Teacher Supply Model (TSM), which informs the Initial Teacher Training (ITT) targets each year.

More details as to how the policy assumption process is managed within the TSM itself, along with some previous examples, can be found in both the 2016/17 TSM and the accompanying user guide.